An analogue brain in a digital domain

Connect:

For several years now, I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback about the Open Source Bridge conference, held annually each June in Portland — perhaps the open source software capital of the world if there is such a thing. Having regularly attended OSCON in the same place every July, it seemed a bit redundant at first. But the more I thought about it, I started wondering how the event could be so successful in the light of another major event’s competition. It didn’t take long after arriving to see why.

First of all, Bridge is a volunteer-run event, compared to OSCON’s (very) corporate feel. During the week someone called the event “the college radio of open source conferences”, which is pretty much true. My take was that everyone who was there, was there because they loved open source and what it stood for … they weren’t just there for networking or business opportunities.

I also wanted to get a feel for how a successful small-ish open source conference ran successfully, to bring back what I could for the OpenMRS Implementers Meetings that I help coordinate every year. I got lots of small practical tips that I’ll try to work in to future events. One thing Bridge did well was combine scheduled tracks with attendee demand — attendees voted on proposed sessions and then the organizers scheduled the most-voted sessions based on demand. Not quite a unconference, but pretty close. However, the pure unconference still made an appearance on the final day, with folks proposing and scheduling sessions that same day.

One of the main themes of the event for the past several years has been focused around the notion of “open source citizenship”. Although I’ve spoken with colleagues often about how contributions to open source projects are a give-and-take relationship, I hadn’t before considered the metaphor of citizenship. I like it. Just like in any “real world” community, people participating are expected to both give and receive with their neighbors, an open source project is a similar collaborative effort to build a place that people want to spend their time. Collectively as a community, we all create space where people feel free to explore their ideas and share those ideas with each other, and a place where people help their neighbors live up to their potential.

Open Source (Lego) Bridge. CC-BY-SA by soycamo

In the OpenMRS community, there are many ways for us to tear down fences and build more bridges to connect the different areas where we work. Much of that will be my focus over the next year. Some of those improvements will come through better, more transparent communication channels. Some will happen by reaching out and helping newcomers find their way and get connected to people and opportunities. And finally, some improvements in our community will happen by doing better about recognizing all the ways in which people contribute to OpenMRS — whether that’s by programming, writing documentation, or sharing stories and getting other people excited about our passions. Open Source Bridge left me with some concrete ideas of things we can put into practice to do better.

It won’t be long until I’m back in Portland for OSCON, and I’ll certainly be faced with some different reflections when gathering with that crowd. But for now, I’m excited to double my focus on building bridges in the OpenMRS community.

Last week, I wrote about teaching folks to fish. This weekend and in the coming week, I’m spending my time thinking about how to help people be better open source citizens. I’ll be attending (finally, for the first time) Open Source Bridge in Portland, and I’ll write more about that next week. But first, some more practical mental exercises were due on the banks of the Ohio River.

I’m writing this while sitting in Piatt Park in downtown Cincinnati, outside the Garfield Suites Hotel where the 2013 Open Help Conference is underway. A couple of weeks ago, Paul Biondich and I were discussing documentation and stumbled across Shaun McCance and his work organizing these events to discuss the challenges of documentation and support in open source communities. It seemed too good to be true to have such a valuable resource waiting just down the road from OpenMRS HQ in Indianapolis, so Paul and I decided to head down for the weekend together with Burke Mamlin to re-double our efforts to improve OpenMRS documentation.

"Helping people not feel stupid is a major job of documentation." #openhelp

We’ve talked for a few years as a community about just how bad our OpenMRS documentation sucks, and if anything it’s nice to be reminded that we aren’t alone in our struggles. But more importantly, this weekend gave us space and time to focus and think critically about how we need to take decisive action to do something about it. OpenMRS is, by necessity, a powerful and flexible platform, and that flexibility often manifests itself as confusing to newcomers, especially given our dearth of useful documentation.

This quote from Kathy Sierra is a clear reminder to me about our community’s collective tendency to simply point people to our large collection of documentation and hope for the best. The problem with such an approach is that some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, some of it’s current, and some of it’s outdated. And most of all, most of it’s not structured in an ideal way for people to find what they need, unless they know exactly what they’re looking for.

Saturday evening, the three of us here had a pleasant chat and dinner with Janet Swisher from Mozilla, who helps lead up their developer documentation. We talked about the “chicken and egg” problem about giving people in the community positions of leadership in documentation (with the assumption that they’ll build a volunteer team of writers) … when we don’t have a good pipeline of people making documentation contributions to begin with.

And so, our inclination is to try to build a scaffolding structure of documentation with the help of some generous contributors, along with some examples of what good documentation looks like, and advice for our community on creating it. Our current thinking is that if we make an honest effort at providing some decent resources for potential documentation volunteers, those who come will see some bite-size contributions to get them started and “hooked” in the community, just like our engineering contributors experience.

On Monday, we’ll be reflecting on our experiences this weekend and doing some planning together with Elyse Voegeli, our summer intern from the FOSS Outreach Program for Women, who will be helping us work with our community to start doing some of the highly creative heavy lifting necessary to get there. We’re hoping to help her craft a really rewarding experience in helping us to create the foundation that will help OpenMRS grow very quickly by providing more opportunities for volunteers to contribute—both in terms of documentation and in terms of development. If you feel as hopeful as we do that documentation can make a big difference, an involved already in the OpenMRS community, or if you’re interested in getting involved, I hope you’ll join us.

One of the best parts of my role at OpenMRS is teaching people to fish. We don’t hand out poles and bait, but we do share knowledge and tools to help people collaborate on a massive project to build health technology on a global scale. As Confucius said,

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.

Every year, I’m honored to be able to oversee our internship and mentorship programs at OpenMRS. Through programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW), we’re able to introduce people to the world of free and open source software. In GSoC, university students receive financial support so they can spend their summer doing programming for software projects like ours. If not for programs like this, their summers would probably go to the highest-bidding corporation. We’ve been involved in GSoC for several years now, and have created great legacies in several of our contributors, such as Saptarshi and Suranga who have been students, stayed around to learn and contribute, and then became mentors for students in later years. Every year, this “pipeline” continues to increase.

Three generations of GSoC students and mentors at OMRS12.

I’m extra pleased to be participating in the first large-scale summer for OPW. This program attempts to tackle head-on the challenge of getting more women involved in open technology. It started with a single open source group, the GNOME Foundation, and was so successful, several of us (OpenMRS, WordPress, Wikipedia, Perl, Mozilla, EFF, and others) are trying to make it work on a much larger scale this summer. Women are far too under-represented in technology jobs, and it’s completely unfair that it requires so much struggle for them to participate in the field that is most shaping the future. I’m proud to count myself among the early members of the Ada Initiative, an excellent organization working to level the playing field and making sure that women have an active role in leading the next generation. We’ve still got a way to go until we have our fair share of women contributing to OpenMRS, but we’re improving every year.

This year, we have a total of 16 highly talented interns from every corner of the world. Their skill and passion humbles me, but it also energizes me. Even if only a few of these folks stay around after the summer, their energy will really amplify our community of contributors, and it will serve to get even more people involved. I’ve challenged them to tell their stories in blog posts every week throughout the summer. I’ll be highlighting some of them here, and will use that same challenge on myself so you can hear more about my journey along with them.

I have no doubt that they will all be successful at fishing, but I’m hopeful many of them will one day start teaching others to fish, too. That’s how our project remains sustainable and grows, and that’s how we live the values that we hold dear.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while (or at least those of you who have followed me online for several years) can probably remember that this site has contained several blogs off and on as I’ve reinvented myself since 1997 – wow, has Downey.net really been around that long?

Over the past several months, I’ve been reminded in several ways that I need to do a better job at long-form writing, both to support my professional work leading the community infrastructure of OpenMRS, as well as my academic work toward a PhD in human-computer interaction at Indiana University School of Informatics. Both roles require a lot of data collection, analysis, synthesis, and reflection. And, for better or for worse, both have quite a bit of overlap.

My work for OpenMRS has a few dimensions. On a practical level, I need to make sure that our large global community of volunteers has the right tools and resources to collaborate and work with each other. On a higher level, I need to critically view and understand how the people in our community collaborate – not only their presumptions and motivations, but also how we can support their own fulfillment of things like their personal and cultural values and enable them to feel recognized and appreciated for their work. Of course, this is only the “tip of the iceberg and in a large community of virtual collaborators, there are a lot of variables at play.

Fortunately, my academic research is situated in a domain to help me frame this thought and my work. At IU, my PhD research is beginning to focus in on what I’m calling “cross-cultural computer supported cooperative work”. At first, having come out of some time with the US Peace Corps, I was interested in how technology can support international development and as a result focused on the field called information and communication technology for development (ICT4D). However, it became clear to me that ICT4D was really means to an end, and the questions that were more interesting to me were about how people learn and collaborate to build technology that makes their communities better places.

A subtle difference, yes, but an important distinction. It’s not so much about how technology improves the world, but for me what’s more critical is how people use this technology to improve their world.

So, what should I do with this blog? It’s clear I have plenty of thoughts I could share, or at least write down for my own future reference. Some of those thoughts will be related to operational stuff for OpenMRS. Those writings will probably tend to stay on the OpenMRS blog and away from this one. However, I might still write more “meta” thoughts about OpenMRS and its community here, especially as it relates to collaboration and technology’s role in how people build their worlds. It’s pretty obvious that my academic research stuff will live here. Right now I’m working on a project related to something called cultural-historical activity theory, and will be writing more about that soon. And I might even write some unrelated social commentary from time to time, but I’m drawing a blurry line in the sand and stating here that I want to try to frame that commentary in terms of my research interests.